MOTORING ALONG THE SLIP ROAD SIGNPOSTED FREEDOM

Subsistence TEFL teachers are those who neither drifted into the industry on a whim nor decided that it was their calling. They are those enchanted, enviable souls who use TEFL as an easy-going means to earn a living whilst they concentrate on keeping their real passions a-bubbling in the foreground. I fancied myself as something of a subsistence TEFL teacher in the beginning and at various points over my stuttering career, but being a serial procrastinator with an unflinching tendency to do anything but what I should be doing, my attempts have been fruit-free up to now. (You don’t know what it means to me to have managed to start this blog and contribute regularly to it...)

Subsistence TEFL teachers are a fascinating breed, almost as riveting in their driving passions as the oddballs who make of TEFL their own private Idaho. Over the years there have been writers, musicians, artists and, perhaps most admirably of all, a flamenco dancer. Imagine being English and dedicating a couple of decades of your life to learning the uncompromisingly Spanish art of flamenco dancing, eventually getting so good at it that you can teach it to the similarly fixated. Not just teach it, but teach it to Spaniards. In Andalucia. Now that takes cojones, not to mention various pairs of sturdy stomping shoes.

The sad thing about subsistence TEFL teachers is that, just as Joseph Campbell predicted when he recommended that we all “follow our bliss”, the best get so good at what they love that they end up escaping and making something of themselves in their respective fields. This leaves the rest of us a little the lesser, ruing their departure through the dust they kicked up whilst trying not to let out a primal scream when our latest one-to-one student describes his house as being “near from the hospital”, yet again, despite a fortnight of mainly patient correction.

One such subsistence TEFL teacher has gone all the way and turned a passion for dissent into a truly remarkable phenomenon. My good friend D has created a media watchdog called Media Lens that is so respected (and equally despised, which shows they’re on the right track) that he’s been able to find an exit from the TEFL roundabout and is currently motoring along the slip road signposted "Freedom", living from donations alone and having just co-written his third book, “The Guardians of Power”. They are so good, in fact, that they’ve just been awarded the Gandhi Foundation’s International Peace Award for 2007. Their web address is http://www.medialens.org/.

Now that’s as near from a fairytale as TEFL can get...